ICANN currently dictates that if a registration is deleted within the grace period of 5 days, the ICANN fee will be credited back to the registrar concerned. This practice was put in place to allow for typos and other mistakes made when registering a domain.

But the absence of any penalty meant those seeking effective domain names could register thousands of variations with no financial risk as they would back out of the process for any low-performing names.

Tasting is used to pick up batches of un-renewed domain names as they expire, It allows tasters to see which names still receive significant hits or that have intrinsic value because people are inclined to type them directly into their browsers' URL bar.

ICANN has proposed a solution whereby it will increase its annual fee and immediately, remove the grace period of 5 days. As well as Charging the ICANN fee as soon as a Domain Name is registered. This would remove the loophole used by tasters to taste domain names and make them profitable for free.

According to ICANN, in January 2007 the top ten domain tasters accounted for 95 percent of all deleted .com and .net Domain Names. Those ten were responsible for 45,450,897 deletions.

Domain tasting is also alleged to be used by some registrars. When someone investigates the availability of a particular domain name using their system, the company will immediately register the Domain to itself. This can merely make it difficult for people to shop around for the best deal from different registrars; at worse, an unscrupulous registrar could offer the name to the would-be customer at an inflated price.